I forget just how painful Mother’s Day is until I log onto our modern (virtual) social commons and am overwhelmed by the beautiful sentiments outpouring from daughters and sons to their holy ones, their ardent Mothers, who return in such graceful kind the love that swaddled us in nursery rhymes and kept us aligned in the dizziness of inevitable darkened times of which our life has initiated us. I don’t want in any way to detract from this--this bliss-kiss from soul-inspired lips: Mothers are sacred and deserve their honour. May it bloom aplenty and a plenty flowers wake…

Yet for some on this day when maternal ties are celebrated, it is near impossible to do so. I talk of those who are estranged from mother. The reasons may not be important, too personal, in fact, to be raised in a virtual space, where breaths are intangible and the beat of the heart a silent rhythm. But it is so: for some Mother’s Day is met with the spectre of disconnection and the haunting hubris of void. 

I haven’t seen my mother in the flesh for years now. I cannot even recall the last time I saw her face. Our tenuous relation is kept afloat by seldom phonecalls that vie for endearment and, thankfully, often evoke it, though in brief spurts that have huddled me around the name precious. Mental miasmas have mired things. Adversities have made rifts instead of ribbons. And I have long lingered in healing with no resolutions and have had to painfully accept things as they are. Perhaps the hardest thing I ever learned to do was accepting I couldn’t heal my mother nor draw a bridge between us. This failure of intent marked my transition from boyhood to manhood, in the accepting of my own limitations which forced (finally) a rechanneling of heroism from grandiose ideas of saving mother to the sobering assent of having to remain in the distance, with a torch ever-burning and a realm of myself ever-vigilant to embrace her whenever she would come…if ever she would come…

I do not intend for this to be complaint or a geyser fomenting with cynical despair, but only a call to widening of the gaze of this day to embrace too the howling wounds out in the periphery; in the wild forests that besiege the serene citadel of celebratory rejoice, where we go not and even are unawares. There’s no blame needed in that—many are occupied today in the teeming joy of remembering and exalting Mother. And what a luminous, lovely thing. Really. Mother is a role and a duty to which our civilization owes almost everything. And yet, as we rise as a more unified humanity and inspired community, it is our duty to make sure no one is left behind in these celebratory acts. Such is the radical revision of love so needed in our explosively expanding times. We need to widen with ferocity the perspective of the heart to acknowledge that sometimes on days reserved for instinctive joy there are those forgotten in the jubilance who are unable to participate.

We see this widening so incredibly in the embrace of so many disenfranchised groups, as if humanity has awoken from a divisive daze and is ruddy with desire to hold all close in the oneness of communal, species bond. In the embrace of homosexuals, of victims of rape and bullying, of transgenders, of all cultural nuances; all eccentricities. Not a day goes by where I don’t see another beautiful widening of the heart on our virtual social commons and on the bubbling streets, where some post describes another heroic human effort to overcome ignorance and prejudice, to return to a harrowing position of unknowing, to welcome anew a lost fragment of ourselves in the alienated other. The strength built by this persistence is one of the most wondrous things occurring in our present era. Each widening of humanity’s heart cultivates profound power and it’s becoming overwhelmingly beautiful. The heart is revealing itself as the true power of this planet with love as its force; revised love, brimming with awe.

Today I love and honour the mirth bestowed on Mothers. And I love and honour those who cannot, for whatever reasons, be so bridled in affection. If I can provide any counsel to my brethren in such wobbly standing it is to seek the essence of Mother, perhaps to sit on the Earth today as I plan to do and have done in recent Mother’s Day and given thanks to the Mother of Mothers. And then, as the sun blazes into a whisper of its former fire, walk to the edge of the forest where wounds howl barely in places our ears cannot trace, where tears fall as rain, and try to see if we can spy her, somewhere, anywhere…I may even call to her, perhaps pick up the phone, but even then it’s a risk, always a risk, for some horrible conflict may emerge and we must not talk about those things that were agreed upon...I will long to run to find burial in her bosom, as I once did, but those times have died. And so I will honour death and the things that go on through, mystifying it all. Mother, this life has been kind to us and also has bludgeoned us. I am not destroyed nor distraught. In fact, I am stronger because of it all. It has been an initiation and I grew with it, not against. I am thankful for the gifts you and I have given each other, though they were wrapped in wounds. Wounds are wisdoms in waiting, and I am not waiting anymore…may there be a day when you see that in me and grow proud for some of that was your work on this little soul…oh what a smile would be…To those without mother, you are never without. She is there, somewhere, and beneath whatever happened is something that is always happening; a love without end, leaping over borders, over limits; a love that cannot be done away with, no matter what. Connect there, though she may feel it not skirting on the surface, beneath, in the shimmering deep where we don't see light, there are secret sparks that transcend all distance, all walls...Do not despair but attend to loving, with haste, without anything left to waste...And always hope that one day, the energy of the embrace will crawl into form. And if not…if not…know it has not all for naught, for every good thought sent is received even if not conceived for us to see. Magic, yes indeed, and we magical human beings have the power always to send, even at distance, a love that will surely find the one beyond the lines…Oh, Mother, this today I send to you. No need to answer. That was never the point. Never…